


news from a distant place

by maplemood



Category: Sicario (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Families of Choice, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Morally Ambiguous Character, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 11:07:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16173827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: “So—” A whip-curl of fury cracks through Kate’s gut. Relax.Relax.She’s just a kid. “—what’s the story? He shoot you too?”Kate, Alejandro, and Isabel—and the long road to something like home.





	news from a distant place

**_I. Before_ **

 

**Chandler, AZ**

**2018**

 

“So?”

“So what?” Eyes flash sullenly under the bill of a frayed baseball cap. Sharp eyes, sharp face, a body all jittering angles trapped in a corner booth. Her teeth snap like a wolf’s.

“So—” A whip-curl of fury cracks through Kate’s gut. Relax. _Relax._ She’s just a kid. “—what’s the story? He shoot you too?”

 

**2015**

 

After—

(I’m gonna tell everyone what you did.

Sign it.

Gonna—

Kate. Sign it.)

***

The mess that started in Juárez leaves her thin-skinned. Wide-eyed, frayed nerves and temper both simmering too close to the surface; jumpy on balconies. Kate settles back into her pack-a-day habit with the same focus she brings to official reports. Yellowed nails, ashtray breath and all. That’s the price you pay for scraping up what’s left, for leaving the shit that can’t be carried behind—and pretending it doesn’t still grind and slice beneath your skin.

She resigns. Eventually. Doesn’t move away or move on, maybe out of stubbornness. Or spite. Or maybe the reason is darker, duller. A snivelling kind of weakness. Some cry for attention she knows full well he’s too smart to answer.

(You are not a wolf.)

***

Years pass.

 

**2018**

 

“He shoot you too?”

The girl shakes her head. Kate shrugs, snagging a fry to swirl through side-by-side blobs of mustard and ketchup. “Got me in the ribs. Right—” She flickers a hand under her breasts, hopes that mumbling through a mouthful of food will cover the hitch in her voice. The hitch that sticks around, three years on. “He knew I had my vest on. Knew it’d bruise like a bitch, too.”

Kate doesn’t catch what the girl mutters under her breath, doesn’t need to. Shoulders hunched over a burger she hasn’t touched—Kate’s already put away one herself and could honestly go for another—the kid looks younger than sixteen. A good ten pounds too skinny. Chipped nails, a tank-top mustardy under the arms, a greasy helmet of chopped-short hair. A mess.  

Yeah. Can’t say it’s an unfamiliar look, can she? Kate swallows and reaches for her water glass. He always did have that effect on women—on the ones lucky enough to get away from him alive, though luck has nothing to do with it, and lately she’s been thinking that vengeance comes second to his need to play God.

Yeah, yeah. She’ll get around to feeling bad for that. One of these days.

Kate sets the glass down. “Carina.”

_“Isabel.”_

“Isabel,” she says mildly. Christ, she worked kidnap response for five years, battering down walls to get to girls just like this one; Kate used to be good at this. “I’m not a mind reader,” she says, resting folded arms on the tabletop. “You want to hear something, you’re going to have to tell me what it is.”

As if she doesn’t already know.

The girl’s eyes narrow. Kate can’t tell, this time, if they’re sullen or resentful. Or—shit, but she prays not—hopeful.

“Okay. I want to hear everything you know about Alejandro Gillick.”

***

Two months before a runaway looking for a dead man corners her in the Triangle Diner, Home of the Best Burgers This Side of the Border, she remembers that three years, really, is nothing. Nothing at all.

“Jesus,” says Kate. “Jesus fuck.”

Two minutes ago she was standing next to a battered little car parked neatly in a visitor’s space, sunburn stinging fresh across her nose and shoulders, cargo shorts yanked up and buttoned over a damp one-piece, smoking her second cigarette down to the filter and knowing that when she went to open her apartment door, she’d find it already unlocked.

(You will not survive here.)

 _Jesus,_ she’d thought, smoke catching on the half-formed sob bubbling in her throat. _Isn’t this what you wanted? Digging your heels in so he could cut them out from under you?_ Jesus.

Now?

Glass in her throat, gulps of gravel. She doesn’t lower the gun. Doesn’t let her eyes stray for more than a second to the milk glass, rinsed and drying along the dish rack, before turning them back to him. To his eyes, his face.

Jesus _fuck._

Something raging, pounding, something fucking molten rips through Kate before she can stop it. She takes a step forward. Another. One foot after the other, until the barrel grazes over his heart. Until she could reach out and touch his cheek.

She doesn’t. She’s not that cruel.

“Jesus,” Kate repeats. She’s not that kind, either. “What the hell happened to you?”

***

“Everything I know could fit on a napkin.” It’s not quite a lie.

“I don’t care,” Isabel says. Quiet, desperate. She grabs a napkin from the dispenser and begins to shred it, bits of paper twisting to knots between her shaking fingers. The anger she sparked in Kate minutes ago fades to nothing. God, she’s small. Bird-boned. Kate’s no heavyweight herself, and she could swallow her whole.

“You need a minute?” she asks, though the damage is long done and there’s no going back. Not for either of them.

“No. Tell me.” Isabel looks up. Meets her eyes for the first time; if she expected that sharp face to crumple, showing all the snot and blubber underneath, well. She’s out of luck. All Isabel has is more sharp angles, more grating, terrified need. “Tell me everything.”

***

Two beers, her gun, and a grainy photocopy of a school ID sit on Kate’s kitchen table between them. She stubs out her fourth cigarette of the day before sliding the copy closer. “Pretty girl.”

Sure, it’s not the most feminist line she’s ever dropped (little boys are praised for what they do, little girls for what they already are—Kate’s had a whole life, thirty-one years, to learn this). What more can you tell, though, from a school picture? Isabel Reyes looks good on her ID, a feat Kate’s never managed. Lip gloss, eyeliner, not a hair out of place. But despite the smile, she’s not happy. Those eyes give it away. Sullen. Wary. “Where is she now?”

Alejandro takes the copy from her. “Across the country,” he answers, pronouncing the familiar words as if they no longer feel at home in his mouth. He speaks even more carefully than Kate remembers, gingerly; every word takes something out of him. Part of her, furious with embarrassment and all too close to sympathy, wants to clamp her hands over her ears and bolt from the room.

“New York. Connecticut, maybe. Far from the border.” His palm presses flat, covering the girl’s face. “You should have followed my advice.”

She reaches for her lighter.

“We never should have met again,” Alejandro says—actually says that, and she has to laugh. Shit. She used to hold on to a shred of respect for this guy. Used to believe he was at least self-aware.

“And yet here you are,” she says, breathing in smoke. The shot could have taken off his jaw, blown his brain out the back of his skull. Instead, what? Two ugly wounds, some slurring. That shot held more mercy than he’s ever shown one of his own marks, and the gratitude Kate feels on his account turns her stomach.

For a moment, he watches her in silence. Shadowed eyes, wolfish jowls. Three years down the road, and he is ever the same. “Here I am.”

***

“He didn’t shoot me, he held a gun on me,” Isabel tells Kate. Then blurts, “And I didn’t know it was him then,” so quickly she almost interrupts herself. Her stare dares Kate to point out that’s no kind of excuse. “You don’t understand—he was a good man at the end.”

 _Was_ being the operative word, much more so than _end,_ but Isabel doesn’t know that. And how convenient must it be, having one final, clear-cut act of selflessness to stack against two days’ worth of calculated cruelty? The whole might be greater than the sum of its parts, but who ever remembers the whole?

“You don’t understand.”

Kate knows that the girl who used to be Isabel Reyes loves Alejandro Gillick more than she loves herself. She knows, and she understands why. It’s not a wake-up call, not at this point; it’s not a revelation. It’s the end of one story, the beginning of another. Pure and simple.

***

“Don’t put this on me.” She snatches the empty beer bottles and the overflowing ashtray she’s sure Alejandro has been eyeing since he made himself at home in her kitchen. Murder and blackmail, at least they beat smoking. Kate yanks the trash can out from under the sink so she won’t have to turn her back on him. “Don’t you dare.”

He refuses to take the bait. Sits silent at her table, in her home, using that silence like a fucking weapon— _Come on, Katey, didn’t you miss it? Didn’t you miss feeling like a kid, like a stupid little girl about to piss her pants? Man of few words, my ass._ Alejandro’s silences say as much as his words. More.

“I had a job to do,” she seethes. “I thought I had a job to do and I was trying to build a prosecutable case out of your bullshit. I didn’t put a gun to my own head.”

A memory sneaks in unwanted, unneeded: Cold steel biting underneath her chin. His thumb, rough and clean, smelling softly of soap, brushing her tears away.

 _Relax._ Relax.

“You made me feel unsafe in my own home.” The ashtray makes a dirty snowfall over the crumples of plastic wrap and half-finished TV dinners. “Don’t fucking put that on me.”

No answer. The way he looks at her… nothing there, Kate tells herself, but a thin, sometimes-pleasant mask stretched over the face of a killer. But if that were true there’d be no weight to the words Alejandro aims as expertly as his shots.

“You know what I think?” she asks. “I think that little girl reminded you of your daughter.” What, two can’t play this game? “She’d be the right age.” Kate dusts her hands clean on her shorts. “Got a father she never sees—big, important job takes him all over the place. It puts food on the table, but he barely knows her. Hardly recognizes who she’s growing up to be.”

Alejandro’s face doesn’t allow for big, easily-telegraphed emotions, now more than ever. The flex of his fists, Kate picks that up easily enough. “You should tread carefully,” he says. “These are things you do not understand.”

“I understand enough.”

“You think you understand.” It takes all she has not to quail under his gaze. “You think too much, Kate.”

“Too much of myself?” she snaps. “Or too much of you?” If he wanted to kill her with her own gun she’d be double-tapped and bleeding out on the linoleum by now. “You told me I reminded you of your daughter once.”

“It was not the same thing,” he says, furious and weary. The dressing covering both bullet holes yellows under Kate’s crappy fluorescent lights.

“No,” she says. “It wasn’t.”

This time, they’re both silent.

***

The end of one story, the beginning of another.

“Come on,” Kate says, bill paid, tip wedged under the salt shaker, the taste of cigarettes stale in her mouth and the resolution sitting like a stone in her head, flat and still. “I’m taking you home.”

“Home?” Isabel’s lip curls. “Perra, ¿crees que estoy loco?”

_I think you know, deep down. I think you’ll never stop looking, even if it kills you. I think you don’t want to end up like me._

“You didn’t like what I had to say.” Kate’s voice as flat, as still. “You want to make up your own mind?”

A curtain drops down. The girl’s eyes shutter, flash sapped out of them. Perfectly, carefully blank.

“Isabel. You want to make up your own mind?”

A nod.

“Okay.” Kate jerks her chin towards the door. “Let’s go.”

***

(It’s a long story.

Lucky for you I’ve got all night.)

Kate smacks a fresh pack of Indian Creeks against her palm. “Whatever you want, you’ll spare her that,” she says without looking at him. “Maybe because she’s young, maybe because you’re getting old and soft—I don’t care. You’ll spare her. You won’t spare me.” That first breath of smoke is a blessing, better than a cool breeze in August. Still backed against the counter, she cups her right elbow in her left hand and waits.

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” Alejandro says. Some of the old menace still circles, shark-eyed beneath the surface, but only some. Maybe she’s finally surprised him. Or, hell, maybe they’re both just too tired. Too old for this shit.

Kate exhales. “I’m not asking.”

***

The door swings open and Isabel is off like a robber’s dog, shoving past Kate into the refrigerated gloom of the apartment. She stops suddenly, not three feet out of the entranceway, turns back. Her eyes are huge, red-rimmed and damp, her voice small and breathless, a constant building to a sob that never breaks. “Not again,” she says, pleading. “I can’t—”

The blinds are drawn. The TV hums muted news to an empty living room, but Kate hears water running in the bathroom. She sets her keys down on the side table and shuts the door. “It’s okay.”

“No. No—”

“Isabel, look at me.” She knows she still sounds flat, emotionless. A grade-A bitch, and Kate can only hope that’s what the kid needs right now, because she can’t be anything else, not in this moment, with so much hanging in the balance. Too much. “You’re going to be okay. I promise.”

_“No.”_

God, that face. A thought crosses her mind, unhurried, like it’s always been there. _I would kill for that face._

The water shuts off.

“Honey,” Kate says softly. “Make up your mind.”

The bathroom door opens.

Isabel whirls around.

***

“Tell me more about her.”

“There’s nothing else to tell.”

“Tell me what she’s like.”

Alejandro settles back. The chair creaks. His lips twist, not quite a smile. Almost warm. “She’s a fighter. Very much like you, in that way.”

Kate knows better than to take this as a compliment. “In other ways?”

“She’s seen very little of the world, very little of other people.” He looks past her, to a memory she has no part in and no right to. “She was very young,” Alejandro says, “and she thought she saw me for who I was.” His thumb traces an absent circle on the photocopy, over the girl’s face. “She was wrong.”

 

**_II. After_ **

 

**Chandler, AZ**

**2018**

 

Later Kate will figure they got lucky: the kid wasn’t wolf enough to use her teeth. Just her fists, her voice. Clawed fingernails, snarls, howls. Knuckles glancing off an eye socket, the picture—her—splintering to pieces—

“Enough.”

Isabel’s cheek slams to the floor just as Kate’s vision blanks white.

 

**Borderland**

**2015**

 

Matt drags her away from the blinding headlights, away from the asshole who’s got Reggie pinned down with a boot to his chest and a gun to his face. He drags her back into the darkness, and he forces her to the ground.

“Get off me!”

“Relax. Just relax.” His knee, with the full weight of him behind it, presses her bruised ribs. Kate grinds her mouth into the dirt before she can scream and realizes, too late, that it’s exactly what she’s supposed to do. Matt needs her silence; he’s betting on the last shreds of Kate’s tattered pride that she’ll give it to him.

 _Medellín,_ a word all one gasp, bursts of blood and flecks of bone. Alejandro, his face sallow, expressionless and furious at once, looming over her.

_Don’t ever point a weapon at me again._

Keep the watchdog quiet, and the thief slips away in the night.

 _No,_ she thinks, panting, wheezing, Matt in Alejandro’s place, the giant bearing down on her. _Everyone, I’ll tell everyone—_

“What did you think was going to happen?” Reggie will snarl hours later as they face off in the apartment Kate will have moved out of before the end of the week, the both of them furious, worked-over, beaten down and broken in and dumped useless to the side. “Honest to God, what else did you think was going to happen, Kate?”

_I thought—_

In the apartment, when he smiled at her. In the motel, when Alejandro clapped a hand to her shoulder and squeezed it softly, easily, as if they’d known each other for years.

(How’s the neck?)

Under different circumstances, Kate thought, they could have been friends.

 

**Chandler, AZ**

**2018**

When it clears she’s all but on top of them. “Hurt her and I’ll kill you.” Hands steady, words sure. Only her head whispers, _Katey, it’s a little fucking late for that._

Isabel thrashes and snarls, teeth bared, spit-slick. One knee planted in her back, his hand forcing her head to the ground, Alejandro waits out a stream of Spanish too garbled and furious for, Kate suspects, any of them to understand. Not that they need to. Betrayal translates just fine.

“¡Basta! Enough,” he finally repeats, putting all his weight behind that knee in a way that reminds her all too much of Matt; Matt and Alejandro, they’re both big men, used to forcing their will and unbothered by it. “Déjalo salir.”

Isabel squeezes her eyes shut.

“Déjalo salir.” Alejandro bends closer, his mouth to her ear. He’s panting. They all are, bruised, scratched, backed to the corner. Rabid dogs, the three of them. “Ahora.”

Eyes still shut, Isabel turns her face away and screams. And screams and screams, until Kate has to turn away herself, jaw clenched and lips seamed shut, thanking her lucky stars that she picked the duplex after all—and that her neighbors picked this weekend to stay with family in Scottsdale.

“Jesus Christ,” she finally grinds out, dying for a cigarette as she whirls back around. “Are we done here?”

Finally: quiet. Isabel’s face is flushed deep red, smeared with snail-tracks of tears and snot. Alejandro’s is, as usual, near-expressionless. He eyes Kate for a knife-edge of a moment before nudging Isabel in the ribs with his other knee. “¿Mejor?”

She snorts.

Another nudge. “Contéstame.”

“Como sea.”

Alejandro grunts and leans back, easing off the weight a little. “You have a right to be angry,” he says, truly understanding. Fresh tears brim in Isabel’s eyes and Kate almost turns away again. “But—” he leans forward, planting the knee as hard as before, “—you never raise a hand to her, you never raise a hand to me. ¿Comprendes?”

She fixes her glare on the floor. “Sí.”

“¿Sí?” She doesn’t answer. Alejandro stares down at her, sighs, and lifts his hand from the sweaty nest of her hair. “Take a shower,” he says, lifting his knee, as well. “Get yourself clean, and we’ll talk.”

Isabel scrambles up on shaking legs. “I trusted you,” she gulps, as wet and broken-sounding as when she’d first stepped through Kate’s door. Then she spits in his face.

***

“That eye will swell up.”

“I’ll survive.” Kate grabs a hand towel to run under the faucet, bristling like she always does, like every word out of his mouth must be some kind of insinuation, a nod back to the day he held her at gunpoint. She wrings out the towel and turns to him. Dustpan in hand, Alejandro stoops to sweep up the last of a smashed jelly glass. He cocks his head when the sound of running water swells to fill her apartment. Kate does, too; as she braces for more screams, more shattering glass. She reminds herself that, hey, she’s been meaning to spring for a new mirror—but not a peep rises over the rush of the shower.

It’s not reassuring. She pictures Isabel in that shoebox of a tub, hot water streaming down her already flushed and twisted face. Her clothes, kicked in a crumpled pile to the corner. The kid’ll be nursing her own bruises. Kate’s eye throbs.

“Those might scar,” she says, trading the towel for the dustpan. Four fresh scratches rake deep across Alejandro’s cheek, over the pitted, still-fresh scar from the bullet. Look at them too long and she has to bite the inside of her own cheek. “I don’t know why I didn’t figure she’d fight dirty,” Kate says, like any part of the last few hours was in any way planned. The next words, she almost chokes on—“I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“Listen, I—”

“No, Kate.” Alejandro stops her with an upturned palm, the towel pressed to his cheek. His voice is controlled, inflection all but smoothed away, just like it was when he bent to Isabel’s ear. “Why did you bring her here?”

The million-dollar question, the one she can’t explain even to herself. Kate kicks the dustpan and trash can both under the sink. “I need a cigarette.”

He waits, patient as ever, until she’s got one clamped between her lips and is facing him again, in the kitchen where he pinned a sixteen-year-old girl to the floor and Kate let him do it. She inhales, thinking that if the Kate of three years ago could see her now, she probably would have put Alejandro’s gun to her own head.

“She found me.” It sounds like an excuse. It _is_ an excuse. “You think I, what, up and flew her across the country just to fuck with you? She came looking, and she wanted to know everything I know. Everything about you.”

She can’t say she’s surprised when her back slams to the edge of the counter, can’t even claim she wasn’t half-hoping for it with that cringing, resentful corner of her brain that pants for an excuse, any excuse. Alejandro’s fingers circle the base of Kate’s neck. His thumb presses to the hollow of her throat; those pouchy hangdog eyes spark with nothing. They’re flat, uncaring—it’s their emptiness that will eat her alive. “Answer me.”

Eat her alive, and pick the bones clean. The cigarette she already almost choked on trembles in Kate’s lips. With his free hand, Alejandro plucks it out, stubs it on the counter.

(You don’t understand.)

“She loves you.”

The sound he makes is soft and ugly. “You think she’ll love me any better once she’s dead? When Matamoros get their hands on her, knowing the part she played?”

Babies dissolved in acid, women raped and mutilated, their eyes gouged out, their breasts cut off. Kate’s breath hitches against his thumb. “So you’d rather have her wandering around the border on her own?” she whispers. “Stirring up all kinds of shit, looking for you? She’d never stop, Alejandro. Not even if she kept believing you’d died her whole life. She’d never stop.”

He draws back. For a second Kate wonders if he believes her. Then Alejandro’s knuckles press under her breast, right where the bullets would have struck if it hadn’t been for her vest. Press hard—here it is, the insinuation, the jibe she’s always waiting for. “All down to your soft heart, yes? Don’t lie to me, Kate.” His face twists. “There’s none of that left in you.”

Which is why she asks, still in a whisper, “You think she would have moved on? Like you did?”

***

At the convenience store she buys cereal and milk. Packets of instant oatmeal and trays of microwave mac-and-cheese. A box of tampons and a pack of overnight pads. Kate loads it all, plus two six-packs—one of beer, one of Pepsi—into her passenger seat, knowing they can’t keep going on like this.

Stretches, once as long as two weeks at a time, where he disappears without a word. Stretches where she lies awake at night, one ear cocked towards the living room and the pull-out couch, waiting for him to bolt up out of a nightmare. Guilt, silence, fury. Sour words shot through hazes of smoke. It’s a perfect arrangement for two adults bent on punishing each other as much as they’ve punished themselves. Bringing a kid into it is out of the question.

(“She thinks you’re a good man,” she’d snapped, grabbing for her keys, her purse. The cupboards were empty—get something for dinner. Get out of here. “But hey, maybe that was my plan all along. Maybe I want her to hate you as much as I did.”)

Kate slides behind the wheel and locks her doors. She sits too long in the neon-splashed parking lot, blinking hard. Isabel with her tears. Alejandro with his knuckles pressed under her heart: _There’s none of that left in you._

She wipes her eyes. “The fuck are we doing?” Kate asks the rearview mirror, like she expects an answer. Then she drives home.

***

She must have stalled longer than she remembers. By the time Kate drops the bags on the kitchen table, Isabel’s fallen asleep on her couch. Hair damp, swallowed by a pair of Kate’s old sweats, she curls into herself. Knees drawn up. Hands bunched into fists next to her cheek.  

Alejandro sits across from her. He hardly looks relaxed, arms folded and feet planted flat on the floor—all the same, his chin’s dropped to his chest in a half-doze, which he blinks out of silently at the rustle of the plastic bags.

“She okay?” Kate mouths.

He inclines his head. _Come see for yourself._

On closer inspection the sweatshirt’s ridden up over a thin strip of what must be a sucker of a bruise. Splotched across Isabel’s ribs, faded yellow and green, it’s days old. Must be. Still, Kate has to ask. “We didn’t—”

“No. She was getting in fights at school.” Kate turns to him; Alejandro sounds exhausted and looks it. “The other girls, they’re all bitches, narcs and whores.”

“Is that right?”

His eyes flick to hers, then back to Isabel. “She’s used to having her way,” Alejandro says. Then, like he’s mentioning the weather or the car’s transmission, “It was all she had.”

She sees him, if only for a split-second: The man Isabel wants so badly to believe in. Steady, watchful. Clear-eyed but never cutting. The kind of father kids daydream about having—hell, Kate knows she did. Strong, silent type. A man who’d move mountains for you. Who’d die for you.

She touches a finger to his cheek, careful not to brush the fresh scratches. “You put anything on these? At least some bactine?” Kate knows her eyes are red, still damp at the corners. His are heavy with a mixture of exhaustion and something it does no good to dwell on when Alejandro cups a hand to her side, gently thumbing over one rib. Kate bends her head, reaches down to take his hand and lock her fingers through his. To stop a shiver from coursing through her at his touch. She sighs. When it comes to apologies, they’re both out of practice.

The couch springs creak. “I thought you were dead.” Their hands drop. Kate turns, and Isabel is still lying curled on her side, eyes open, face pale and empty. “I thought you were dead,” she repeats, heaving herself up. “Matt thought you were dead, Steve thought you were dead, we all thought—”

 _I shouldn’t be here,_ Kate thinks as Alejandro gets to his feet. Isabel, mumbling the words like a chant—she wouldn’t want her to see this. Kate has no right to see this. But what’s she supposed to do? Start unpacking the grocery bags? Lock herself in the bathroom? Eventually, she remembers that there’s a can of cocoa powder shoved to the back of one of the cupboards, and a brand-new gallon of whole milk sitting on the table.

***

Cocoa, sugar, water. Pinch of salt. Kate waits for it to bubble, then adds the milk, waits for that to simmer while their voices rise and fall behind her. Alejandro makes an effort to keep it quiet. Isabel’s too far gone to care. “—lost, I couldn’t find you—”

A murmur.

“Don’t call me that!” A gulp, a catch smothered over. “You left me. You shouldn’t have done that.”

“There wasn’t another option,” he says tightly. Kate breaks the skin forming on top of the milk, knowing that whether she wants to hear or not, they’re both speaking English for her benefit, not theirs. “I didn’t plan on being shot in the head, chiquita.”

“After... you let Matt know. You let _her_ know. Why not me?”

She cranks off the heat. Scanning her shelves for three clean mugs, Kate pretends the stab of guilt she feels isn’t mixed with a smug, sly shot of satisfaction. _I came first. Before he ever thought of you, I was a ghost at the back of his mind._

“You left me,” Isabel says, every word a chip of stone, “when you were all I had left. You shouldn’t have done that.”

***

It was never supposed to be something she was proud of.

(I came first.)

But—from the beginning—hasn’t it always been? Matt didn’t pick Reggie for the op. Alejandro didn’t sit impassive through the questions of some hard-nosed narcotics agent to tell the man that nothing would make sense to his American ears. Kate knows it was her inexperience that drew them in, blood in the water. Knows, and hates them for it, as much as she hates herself, and yet—

(You remind me.)

Those moments. Them. Him.

(You remind me of someone very special.)

Kate’s. Hers alone.

She wakes hours before dawn, four a.m. at the earliest, with a pair of bony feet shoved square in her lap and the empty mugs crusting over on the coffee table; Alejandro on one side of the couch, her on the other, and Isabel crammed between them. It’s Isabel’s feet tangled in her lap and Isabel’s breath that sounds out the loudest. Uneasy, muttering in her sleep, she slumps toward Alejandro, her cheek resting in the hollow of his shoulder.

They make a picture, the two of them, his face smoothed over in sleep, hers sheltered against him. What might have been, what can’t be. Late-night conversations. Movie nights over bowls of greasy popcorn. Driving lessons. Graduations. Months. Years.

(The fuck are we doing?)

Kate watches them, cheek propped on her fist, until her heavy eyes droop shut again.

***

She microwaves three bowls of oatmeal. Each one turns out runny, like beaten eggs. Kate’s stirring in sugar and cocoa powder when Alejandro comes up beside her, grabs another spoon and adds more of both to a bowl she’s already mixed.

“Sweet tooth?”

He shakes his head. “She’s too thin.”

“Yeah. Light as a feather, I bet.” They’re both early risers; when they couldn’t take the couch anymore Alejandro scooped Isabel up and carried her into Kate’s bedroom. She’s still asleep in there, as far as Kate knows, unbothered by their noise.

He gets down three milk glasses, she gets the milk. Moving easily together, except when they don’t. Kate carries their bowls to the table.

“You were right,” she says, her back to him, thought it’s always been so much easier than apologizing, admitting Alejandro does actually know what he’s talking about. People, situations—he reads them like a book, and Kate has seen that almost from the moment she first met him. Now, she traces her bare feet across the floor, toeing the familiar scuffs and grooves worn into the linoleum. “If she stays with us… she can’t stay here. Not so close to the border.”

Alejandro scoffs.

Except when they don’t. Kate cranes her neck, ready to let fly, and watches his lips half-quirk, the way they always do when she’s done exactly what he expects of her. “Why should you stay here?” he asks, the milk jug still in his hand. “Now that you’ve got everything you wanted?”

 

**_III. Homecoming_ **

 

**Bethesda, MD**

**2019**

 

“Gordo? GORDO.”

“This fucking cat.” Kate shades her eyes from the sunlight dappling through the oak leaves. “Leave it there. He’ll come down when he’s hungry.”

Isabel rattles the dish harder. “He won’t. He knows too much.” Balanced on the porch railing, she curls her fingers around an invisible syringe and pushes down the plunger.

“So he’s a mind reader now?” Gordo’s next round of shots isn’t scheduled until tomorrow afternoon. Meanwhile, this afternoon, Kate is barely off the clock, swampy under her uniform. Eight years in Arizona and you forget how bad the humidity can get. Collecting in every crease of your body, clogging up the air like damp wool. “Get off. You’re making me dizzy.”

“You can’t reschedule again,” Isabel snaps. “Three strikes and you’re out. Alejandro—”

Kate has to drive her to her job at the Dunkin’ Donuts in ten minutes. Isabel’s uniform is fresh-pressed, only damp under the arms. Her makeup is perfect, a full face of it for six hours of ringing up strangers’ coffees, but underneath Kate sees the cracks forming. Mouth pulled tight. Eyes building up that same sullen, brittle shell.

“He’ll be back.”

Isabel turns and hops down. The porch rattles under their feet. “You don’t know for sure,” she says. “Not until he steps through the door. We never know.”

“He’ll be back.” Denial doesn’t suit Kate, but it’s heavy and hot, a goddamn sauna, and the damn cat isn’t coming down from the damn tree and Alejandro’s been gone three weeks. “He’ll be back, the cat’ll get his shots, everything’s going to be fine. Okay? When’s the last time I lied to you?”

Gordo’s dish drops to the doormat. Cat food showers over the porch and Kate’s shoes.

“That’s what I thought,” she says. Scrubs a damp hand over her damp face and wonders if this’ll be the stretch where she and Isabel finally snap and rip each other’s throats out. They’ve come close enough before. “He’ll be back,” Kate repeats, as much for herself as for Isabel. “Come on, let’s get you to work.”

***

They moved into the house at the end of the street. Four bedrooms, three bathrooms. Oak trees standing tall in the front yard, a swimming pool in the back; a two-car garage and a basement rec room. Two adults, one teenager. A cat. Picture-perfect upper-middle class suburban Americana. Kate’s mother would be proud.

The neighborhood kids, Matt’s two little girls included, call her Ms. K. They flock to Isabel, who gets along with them better than she gets along with anyone from school or work—definitely better than she gets along with Kate. On the bad days you can chalk it up to a pack of six-year-olds being that much easier to boss around, and again Isabel’s the queen of her own little kingdom. The better days, though? On those days Kate thinks she’d have grown up more if she’d ever had the chance to be a kid to begin with.

And Alejandro?

As always, he’s the man at the back of the room, the quiet one nursing a drink poolside. Isabel’s dad, Matt’s good buddy, Kate’s—

If anyone wonders, they never ask.

 

**Dulles International Airport, VA**

**2018**

 

He’s waiting by the baggage claim, hands clasped behind his back and dressed down to the point that her eyes might’ve skipped right over him if it weren’t for Isabel. Without a word, just a quick snag at Kate’s sleeve, she darts to the man in jeans and a plaid button-down, hesitating a second before wrapping her arms around him. Alejandro drops a kiss to the top of her head, and Kate turns away, baggage receipts in hand.

Two suitcases. A backpack, a duffle bag. There’s more, packed up and shipped over weeks ago, but not much more. Still too much, maybe—Kate slings the duffle strap over her shoulder and imagines that last trace of Arizona air, sharp as a splinter of sunlit glass, wisping off the folds of the bag and into her side, slicing between her ribs.

Then they’re both beside her, Alejandro reaching for the backpack and plucking the duffel strap off her shoulder, Isabel grabbing for her suitcase’s handle. “Matt’s here,” she tells Kate, glancing to Alejandro for reassurance. For all the makeup and curled hair, she looks like a little girl when she’s scared. “He’s waiting in the car.”

It’s safe to say Kate never expected they’d be back on speaking terms so soon. “Just our luck,” she mutters, and gets an unsteady flash of a grin in return.

“How was the flight?” Alejandro asks. His sunglasses pushed up and out of the way, there’s something cautious in his expression, something almost uncertain. Kate knows her expression mirrors it, sleepy and slack-jawed as it is.

“Still can’t sleep on planes.” She shrugs. “Wasn’t too bad. We watched a movie.”

 _“Titanic,”_ Isabel says. She stands between them, like she always does. Always; Kate noticed it before the move and knows he did, too. She winks at Alejandro over Isabel’s head, covering her yawn too late.

“How’s the house?”

“Good—it’s good.” Turning, he leads them away from the baggage claim, around chattering knots of people and past the coffee shops and cafes, all warm and wafting steam. “Matt had Carmen come in after we unpacked everything. She fixed things up for you.”

 _Yeah? I bet she did._ The idea of Matt unpacking her stuff is only slightly worse than the idea of Matt’s girlfriend rearranging it all to her own liking, but since it’s Matt’s bullshitting that cleared the way for Isabel’s new placement, Kate is just going to have to find it in her heart to be grateful. _I am,_ she thinks. Softly, like it makes a difference. _I am._

Under different circumstances…

(You saw things you shouldn’t have seen.)

Caged in by his knees, weighed down under him. A big man, a man whose word carries weight; Kate can be grateful for that now but she wasn’t then, and she’d be stupid to think his word can’t turn on her again. Worse than stupid.

(Just relax.)

One, two.

(Relax.)

“Kate?” Alejandro and Isabel wait on her while the sliding glass doors hiss open and shut on blasts of moist air, gray skies heavy with rain. No openness here, no space. Hairs along her arms prickle. “Everything okay?” Alejandro asks, his face no more troubled than it is understanding. Unsurprised, for all the good that does her. Kate huffs out a quick breath, nods.

“Yeah,” she says, while Isabel taps her foot and three years back, in a jet cruising over Texas, his suit rumpled, his eyes still blown wide from a nightmare, Alejandro stared Kate down, daring her to ask another question as he echoed the same words: “Yeah. I’m fine.”

 

**Chandler, AZ**

 

He passes his phone over. Kate slots it between her ear and shoulder, fingers pinched to the migraine already twinging between her eyes. “It’s me. Go ahead.”

Let it never be said that Matt doesn’t oblige. During the op, he never raised his voice to her but for a handful of times—this isn’t the op. This time, it’s as personal to him as it is to her, to all of them, and Kate leans back with a grunt, lets his barks wash over her. The toilet tank presses a cool band to the center of her back; Alejandro faces her from his seat on the edge of the bathtub, legs planted wide, keeping himself unreadable and apart.

About three minutes in Matt snarls, “You know what was left when we got her back across the border?”

“Kidnap response, remember?” Kate’s about to snap. He cuts her off before she starts.

“Fucking _nothing._ Nothing at all. I carried her on, I had to carry her off, we tried getting her on her feet and her legs just folded like fucking spaghetti. She’s lying on the ground, she’s got her face pressed up against my boots and she doesn’t care. She’s pissed herself and she doesn’t care about that, either. Sixteen goddamn years old, I’ve got to find someone to go into that bathroom and change her panties for her.” A breath. “She needs to put it behind her, as much as she can. Rubbing elbows with you two assholes every damn day—you see the problem here? Huh?”

Her entire head clenches. “Matt. She can’t put it behind her.”

“Too bad.” His voice implacable, without a hint of irony. “Carina—”

“Isabel.”

“Stop! Fucking stop.” Another breath. “A life of her own, that’s what we tried to give her. She’s not your redemption, Kate. Not his, either.”

“I know that.” She does snap this time, but it’s too small, crumbling at the edges.

“Goddamnit,” Matt says, a little softer, sensing he’s cut deep. “Maybe we did wreck you. I took you for a lot of things, Kate, but selfish was never one of them.”

“Fuck you,” she breathes. Her hand slips. She brings it up again to cradle her aching head, drawing her legs up to tuck under her, trembling, imagining Isabel empty-eyed and curled on the cold tiles, Isabel blood-spattered and screaming, Isabel pressed under Alejandro’s knee— _Jesus, he’s right, fucking Matt, he’s right and I did this, oh God, I—_

(Honey, make up your mind.)

 _Jesus fuck,_ God _—_

Alejandro’s touch shocks her like a splash of cold water. “Kate,” he says.

When she looks up he’s looming close, too close, all but straddling her like he did with the affidavit in his pocket, the gun in his hand. Watching her break, watching her cry—the way she remembers it, sometimes, he looked stricken, sick with himself but, _tell the truth, Katey,_ there’s no way she could have told, one way or another. Her eyes were too blurred with tears.

The phone still clamped under her burning cheek, she watches, caught for a moment and paralyzed, as his hand slips from her shoulder and behind her head to cup the base of her skull. “It’s done,” he says. No pity in his voice, and why should there be? It’s the second time she’s forced his hand. “She’s here now. You can’t take it back.”

It occurs to her that she once swore she’d never let him see her break down so completely again. She nods. “Matt,” Kate says, and Alejandro’s hand slips away. “Who told her my name?”

“Maybe I mentioned it—”

“Point is, she took it and ran with it.” She straightens up, crosses her legs tighter, pulls her hair back one-handed. Alejandro watches, his face pensive. “She tracked me down, New York to fucking Arizona,” Kate says. “She’s not my redemption, but she’s not going to move on for you, either. And if you want to drag her back, when she knows that the man who took a bullet for her is alive, here, with me—” There’s no reason for that, no reason for the soft flutter in her gut that offsets, if only for a second, the throbbing in her head. Kate snorts, breath sour, dying for a cigarette. “—shit, be my fucking guest.”

***

It’s an addiction, she thinks, this inability to leave the past behind or well enough alone. Followed her through college, the Academy, a cross-country move, a marriage, a divorce—now it narrows, tied to one place, one person. An obsession.

 _Selfish._ Matt’s not wrong.

At least four nights a week, she wakes to screams. In the hairline fracture between sleeping and waking, she’s there with Isabel; the desert, the night sky, a blinding light and a gunshot. And it’s always that sickly flash that sends her shuffling out of the bedroom, neck sweat-cold beneath the mess of her hair, oversized T-shirt flapping to her knees. Wordless, misguided. _I know, I can help. Let me help you._

She stubs her toe, swears. They turn on her, both of them—Isabel a shivering knot on the air mattress, Alejandro on his knees beside her. “It’s okay,” he says, one hand still grasping Isabel’s shoulder, his thumb rubbing small, steady circles. His eyes as dull and empty and exhausted as hers.

Both of them— _let me help you._

“Go back to bed, Kate,” Alejandro says, and she turns away from them, again and again.

 

**Bethesda, MD**

 

“Ms. K.?” Georgia is Matt in miniature, brown-haired and square-faced, always on the edge of a sly smile. “Would you like to hold a kitten?”

“Sure, honey,” Kate answers. Fifteen seconds later she’s cradling an armful of soft fuzz the color of an orange creamsicle, sitting on a wicker bench on Matt’s back porch, staring out across the spread of his perfectly-trimmed backyard. A trampoline, a swingset. A hutch for the rabbits. Shit. It’s all so goddamn _domestic._

“Hey, baby. Hola, baby boy.” Isabel’s kitten overflows her cupped hands, tiny, razor-sharp claws and white-tipped paws, a pink nose freckled with black. Cookies and cream. “I’m going to name him after you,” she tells Matt, who’s sprawled out with most of the porch swing to himself.

“Uncle Matt?” He shoots Kate a lazy grin, all forgotten. The night in the tunnels, the phone call. Water under the bridge, baby. “Kind of a mouthful on that little guy, don’t you think?”

Isabel snickers, then coos when the kitten nuzzles into her shirt. “Nah, the other one. Gordo. Maybe Gordito,” she says, and Carmen, cross-legged in her cushioned chair, snorts. Matt’s girls burst into giggles.  

“Watch it,” he says mildly, aiming a swat with no real force behind it upside her head. “Anyway, Carmen’s sister’s got us hooked on this new keto thing… you heard of that one, Kate?”

His gaze slides back to her, nothing more than politely interested, a little teasing. She rubs the silken space between her kitten’s ears. “Yeah, my mother swears by it.”

New neighbors, old friends. Just like that.

“Dad can’t eat pop tarts anymore,” Georgia says, plunking down next to Isabel. Her younger sister, Sadie, clambers to her feet, shoulders squared, face set. Very carefully, with another black-and-white kitten dangling from her arms, she picks her way across the porch, past Kate and to the other end of the bench, where Alejandro sits with his phone in his lap.

Sadie hoists the kitten up with both hands and asks, “Do you want to hold her?”

He looks up. “Hmm?”

The kitten mewls. “Do you want to hold her?” Sadie repeats. “Her name’s Candy.”

They stare at each other, nonplussed. Alejandro slips his phone back into his pocket while Sadie shifts from one pink-sandaled foot to the other. “Candy,” he says. “Is she sweet?”

“Um, I don’t know?” Sadie gives up holding the kitten out and slings it over her shoulder like a babydoll. “She gets grouchy sometimes,” she admits.

“But not when you hold her.”

“I hold her _right.”_

Alejandro nods. He glances to Kate, then gestures for Sadie to climb up between them. “Show me the right way.”

She giggles. “You’re funny.”

Kate catches Isabel’s eye, smiles. Matt exchanges glances with Carmen. “Man, I should have brought you down here years go.” (It’s not true. This never would have happened before now—they all know that.) He grunts and heaves himself up. “How about another beer?”

***

“She’s a teenager. It’ll pass.”

“She hates me.” The tip of her cigarette flares bright in the dusk. Three months down the road. New neighbors, old friends. Making the lie come true. “Hell, sometimes I hate her too. You think that’ll pass?”

Matt drums his fingers along the porch railing. “Anyone ever tell you you think too much?”

“I was selfish,” Kate says, matter-of-fact. She’s had time to face that, time to realize it should be past worrying about. What’s done is done. “Don’t tell me you don’t still think that.”

He doesn’t answer.

“I’m doing the best I can,” she says. She is—why does it fall so flat? “We both are.”

“You ever talk to Alejandro about this?” Matt asks.

“He knows.”

“Not the same thing, Katey.”

Spoke wisps out her nose. “I know.”

***

Four nights a week. At least. They’re spread out in this new house, each with a room to themselves, each leery of waking up surrounded by too many blank walls, too many empty corners. But that goes unsaid—of course it does—and instead Kate flinches awake every night, some time after twelve, and lies back knowing that just down the hall Alejandro is doing the same, and waits for the screaming to start. Meanwhile it brews inside her, a simmering sludge pinning her down to the mattress. Eyes wide, fists clenched: _Let me help. Let me in._

Again and again, she gets up.

Again and again, she turns away.

***

The rain comes down light and sticky, a spit-warm drizzle. Air’s heavier here—you can’t help but fidget under its weight.

(Matt was waiting for them. In the rain, by his car—a minivan, the trunk already popped, broken crayons scattered across the floor and two car seats strapped in the back. Alejandro had told Kate the bare details. An ex-wife on active duty, two girls—six and four—and a restaurant manager girlfriend. Isabel told her his favorite ice cream was Rocky Road, how miles out of Corpus Christi he’d settled her down in a booth with a banana split the size of her head, rumbled, “Empty calories. They’ll help.”)

She kicks off the sheet, rolls onto her side. Too heavy, too warm. The T-shirt rides up against her skin, sweat-sour.

(Isabel, her face rigid and stretched too tight, suddenly bolted, combined fear and anticipation sending her rocketing into Matt’s arms. A move, instinctive, in the same direction; that bolt reminded Kate of the way she’d exploded in the apartment. Blacking Kate’s eye, raking Alejandro’s already blown-through face. It wasn’t that she wanted to protect Matt, or that she thought he deserved it any less than they had. Training, that was all. Damage control. The stuff she used to be good at.

Alejandro stopped her. His hand wrapped around Kate’s wrist, his thumb pressed to her pulse-point. And Matt, his face softening, bent over Isabel’s bowed head. A quick nod if Kate’s direction. Nothing more.

_Your move. Don’t screw this up.)_

Summer rain, spit-flecks against her window. She waits.

***

Isabel nabbed the master bedroom when she saw that neither Kate nor Alejandro was going to put up a fight for it. Her mistake—biggest bedroom, emptiest bedroom, even with the brand new dresser and vanity and the posters she’s plastered over the walls. And tonight, by some fluke, Kate is the first one to shuffle through the door.

She’s so used to being greeted by Alejandro, his body angled to shield Isabel as if even seeing her in these moments is a right Kate doesn’t have, that at first she’s rooted to the spot. Words stumble useless through her head while Isabel breathes in huge gulps, quick, cut-off whines, her eyes glazed and far away.

“Honey,” Kate finally says. Light from the hallway streams past her, cutting her shadow jagged and black. Isabel squints against it, still whimpering. Her throat bobs as she swallows thickly. She doesn’t answer. “Honey—”

(I would kill for that face.)

(I can’t do this.)

“—I’m going to go get Alejandro,” she finishes, steady, emotionless. Her team leader voice, rooted like a stone. “Right now. Just hang on another minute. Can you do that for me?”

“Okay,” Isabel whispers. Her lips strain, pull tight. She sobs.

“One more minute.”

Kate leaves.

***

He’s the lightest sleeper in a house where nobody exactly hibernates, but he and Matt drove into D.C. around six in the morning and got back well after six at night—bullshitting one official or another, collecting their official ink-and-paper go-aheads; all the legal red tape that he has infinite patience, and no regard, for. Kate kept her lips buttoned, figured she could leave well enough alone for one night at least.

She pads down the hallway to his closed door. Knocks, hiccupy gulps and the panicked rustle of sheets welling up behind her. Long day or not, he has to be awake by now. Anger spikes under Kate’s skin like a splinter, a sliver of the same childlike panic, _I can’t do this, not on my own, don’t leave me alone._ She twists the knob. “I’m coming in.”

The lamp is switched on, the covers pulled back and shoved to the foot of the bed. Alejandro is crouching to grab a pair of sweatpants which he usually wears to breakfast. For once, it isn’t folded neatly. Balled and crumpled up on the floor—he must have been really tired.

“She needs you,” Kate says. Slope-shouldered in the doorway, uncertain.

“One minute.” Alejandro straightens. His hair presses flat on one side, spikes on the other. His eyelids drooping and his face slack along its lines, he beckons her in. “My shirt’s still in the closet,” he explains, apologetic. “Could you—”

“Sure.” She crosses over, hurrying to the closet and picking the single oversized sweatshirt out from a row of slacks, dress shirts, and suit jackets. Jeans, t-shirts, and button-downs are folded neatly in plastic tubs set on the floor, pushed behind a lineup of shoes. Orderly, he calls it. Spartan, more like, but that’s the sour grapes talking. Kate’s not much of a June Cleaver, herself.

When she turns he’s yanking the sweats up over his hips. “Thank you.”

“I’ll tell her you’re coming.”

“Thank you,” he says again, then pauses, staring at her. He shakes his head. “None of us are sleeping through the night anymore.”

It only hits Kate once she’s back in the hall (hits her in the way of, she remembers exactly how fucking _weird_ this whole situation is, and then remembers to be embarrassed). When she opened the door—stepped inside, walked past him, close enough to touch—Alejandro was naked.

***

They’ve lived together almost four months now. Her apartment back in Chandler was a single-bathroom deal, and neither one of them is especially shy; it’s not like they haven’t caught glimpses. A steamed-over silhouette behind the shower curtain, Kate digging through the laundry in her bra. More than that, the one time she hasn’t forgotten but hasn’t taken any particular pains to remember.  It isn’t the fact that he was naked that settles in Kate’s gut, prickling and uncomfortable. Somewhere along the way, they stopped bothering to pretend it was an issue. It’s that somewhere, that hazy, unsettled point when they grew together, as easily as any pair of friends, that nags at her. It was never in the cards. It wasn’t supposed to happen.

_Huh. You keep telling yourself that._

And deeper down—

_You don’t deserve this, neither of you._

The house, the fresh start. Matt, Carmen, Georgia and Sadie, only a block away. Isabel, shivering and broken and at her core unbending steel.

_None of it._

***

Again and again, she’s turned away. But not tonight.

“Don’t,” Isabel says, slotted upright, her back to the headboard. Breathing easier now, but still worlds away. Lamplight gleams off the sweat greasing her face, the twitching, wide-eyed mess of it.

Caught in the doorway for the third time in about as many minutes, Kate stares at Alejandro. It’s never been an option before, as much as she thought she wanted it. Uncharted territory. Wilderness.

“Why are you looking at him?” Isabel asks, with a predator’s instinct for sniffing out trouble. “I asked you. Don’t go.” Nothing pleading in her voice, nothing soft. “Stay with us.”

Kate comes back in. Sits on the opposite side of the bed. Her ass is barely touching the very edge of the mattress when Isabel asks, “Are you happy?” She’s turned back to Alejandro, but the question balloons out over both of them. Flickers in the lamplight like dust-motes, impossible to catch. There’s a desperation to it; Isabel’s never been stupid. _“Here._ Are you happy here?”

_Are you happy here, with me?_

Kate doesn’t decide to do it, doesn’t put any thought into it—just finds herself swinging her legs up and scooting to the headboard, slipping an arm around Isabel’s shoulders, pulling her close. The girl doesn’t exactly relax into her grip, but she doesn’t pull away, either. It’s like holding a doll, stiff, splayed-straight limbs and a dried-out tangle of hair scratching under your jaw. You’ve got to start somewhere. Here. Kate dips her head, kisses Isabel’s temple.

Squatting beside the bed and facing both of them, Alejandro asks, “Are you happy?”

If the question catches her off-guard, Isabel doesn’t show it. Instead she mulls it over until some small part of her goes limp and slumps, boneless, into Kate. “Sometimes. More than before.”

He nods. “Es todo.”

All that matters, all they need.

“No,” Isabel says. Soft now, pleading. Her fingers pleat the sheets, nails nibbled down to stubs. “You two,” she says, and those words shock Kate, electric-sharp. “I wish you could be happy.”

***

Mija.

They’re settling her down, back to sleep, and he says it, smooth and sure, almost as if it’s become automatic. Kate knows better. Isabel knows better and she accepts it regardless, her hand in his, her eyelids drooping closed.

My dear. My daughter.

A little girl, her hair parted, brushed smooth and silky. Rushing, feet slapping down the walkway, a swoop and a squeal as she’s swung up, into the bright blue air. A woman laughing along, solid, constant, a warm weight rooted to the earth.

Him.

Like she does almost every night, Kate imagines him waking, that first brutal start at the sound of a girl’s screams. She remembers him less than an hour ago, the pucker of an old bullet wound on his thigh. Another scar, longer and thinner, laddering up his ribs.

It builds inside her, it bides its time.

Alejandro.

_Him._

 

**_IV. Homemaking_ **

 

**Chandler, AZ**

**2018**

 

“You didn’t say goodbye.” Kate’s on the back stoop, Indian Creeks in hand, when Isabel materializes at her side, stone-faced in a new J.C. Penney tank and cutoffs. “He’s gone now,” she says.

Cross-country moves are trouble enough without witness protection involved. They’d decided it early on: Alejandro would fly back first, set things in order. Make nice, sign the papers, put a downpayment on the house. Kate would run out the last few weeks of her lease, then pack up and fly out, Isabel in tow.

A few weeks. That’s all.

She pinches the cigarette between two fingers, knowing they’re both tense. Early-morning sour. “Alejandro will be fine.”

They don’t say goodbye. Never have.

Fanning away bluish smoke, Isabel shoots her a narrow look. “He said the same about you.”

“Did he.” It’s not quite six yet. Pale blue and paler pink, the sun out of sight.

“Yeah.” They stand not an inch apart, not touching. “He says to take care.”

***

The first night he sleeps on her couch—the very first—Alejandro lets Kate watch him change the dressing covering his bullet wounds. A one-time deal; she senses that right away. Hunkered over the sink in the pasty fluorescent light and grime of a bathroom she hasn’t bothered wiping down for days, those couple minutes stretch thin. Not precious or even personal. Just intensely private.  

Because of that, she forces herself to keep looking, not to wince or bite her lip when he packs saline-soaked gauze into the holes. Watching anyone else wouldn’t rattle her. Kate doesn’t love the sight of blood, but she’s seen too much to start swooning now.

She’s seen so little of Alejandro, though. Little enough that the idea of him being anyone but the man who does the hurting still unsettles her. Wraps a fist around the base of Kate’s spine and clenches tight.

He presses the second gauze pad down. Tapes it. Scoops the used supplies into a plastic bag, zips it shut, throws it away. Every movement measured, wasting nothing, and she wonders how long, in minutes and hours, he sprawled helpless in the dirt. Gargling blood, spatters of flesh, a shattered tooth.

Kate turns to the door. On her way out she says, “The couch folds out. Not sure I have any clean sheets, though.”

Water spurts from the faucet. “Kate.”

She turns again. His eyes meet hers in the mirror. “Thank you.”

 

**Bethesda, MD**

 

“Are you fucking him?” Isabel asks once. Just once.

She grew up alone, you have to understand that. Spoiled and on her own; other kids want for nothing and nobody but Isabel wanted, and still wants, everything. Isn’t shy about getting it, either. Kate has to admire that on the days it doesn’t send her stalking to the porch, lighter ready to go.  

Relax. A click, a flame. Puff of smoke. _Fucking relax._

“I wasn’t special,” she snaps in the middle of an argument that somehow blew up over an algebra worksheet. _I wasn’t, and neither were you. Remember that._ “Just another piece he was moving around.”

“Just another piece who’s shacked up with a sicario now.” Isabel snorts. “Okay.”

***

The man who hurts, the man who’s being hurt. One and the same, always.

(I can’t sign that.)

(He was a good man.)

One and the same, the three of them together.

***

She wakes to the smell of frying eggs, refried beans and salsa, and the screech of the smoke alarm coming from the kitchen. Kate’s halfway down the stairs when it shuts off, Alejandro at her heels. Early-morning air, already warmer than it has any right to be, leaks through an open window along with the smoke. A scorched frying pan sizzles in the sink. There’s a bowl of warmed-over salsa sitting in the center of the table next to a pitcher of orange juice, and three plates circled around it, piled high with fried tortillas and eggs.

“Right on time.” Isabel’s dressed in a pair of Kate’s running shorts and one of Alejandro’s worn-soft plaids. “I forgot to turn the heat off,” she explains, hustling from the sink to the coffeemaker with Gordo two steps behind. She flaps a hand in their direction. “Sit.”

The tortillas are blackened at the edges, and some of the egg whites are runny, but it’s nothing salsa and beans can’t fix. Isabel watches like a hawk as Kate forks into an egg yolk and Alejandro spreads refried beans over his tortillas. “It’s good?” she asks. More than once.

“Very,” Kate says, a glass of orange juice sweating in her hand. She doesn’t like coffee apart from the caffeine buzz, never drinks it on days she isn’t working.

“The tortillas are perfect,” says Alejandro, who drinks his coffee black and always flips the toaster to the highest setting.  

Isabel grins. “Catalina taught me how to toast them,” she says. “Back home.”

It’s a perfect morning. After they’ve mopped up the last dribbles of egg yolk Isabel disappears upstairs to shower and change, Gordo slung over her shoulder. Kate starts on the dishwasher, and Alejandro attempts to scrape off the pan.

“Who’s Catalina?”

“One of the maids.” A butter knife in one hand, he stops to sip his coffee. “She didn’t tell you?”

Kate shrugs. “She doesn’t tell me much.” And there’s no way he doesn’t know that.

“Well.” Alejandro sets his mug down. “She trusts you.”

“As much as she trusts you?” Dry. Teasing, even—so sue her. It’s been a good day so far.

“She admires you very much.”

Kate rinses off their three plates. Rinses them again. She slots them next to the salsa-crusty bowl, then looks back up. “She said that?”

She sounds like a starstruck teenager. Thank God the girl in question is burning through the hot water upstairs, and thank God Alejandro isn’t the type to laugh his ass off, perfect morning or not. He rinses the butter knife and passes it to Kate before reaching for the scouring pad. “She doesn’t have to.”

***

Bits and pieces over time. Isabel doesn’t open up to her like she does to Alejandro, probably never will, but when he’s gone—often enough, now that she lets Kate comfort her at night—she needs an approximation of his silence. A poker-faced bulk taking in every word without comment. Kate does the trick.

She hears about Mexico, mostly. Summers with a stepbrother’s family in Cancún, the stepsister who called Isabel a little bitch and locked her in a closet for spilling a drink when she was six. A great-aunt’s funeral. Or Kate hears about the jumbled months in White Plains, the Sanchezes with their canned smiles and flasks of holy water. The one time Matt drove all the way from Maryland when Isabel (Carina then), already on her way to being expelled, kneed another girl in the stomach.

She hears about running away. About the endless highways between New York and Arizona, cash saved up and stolen, four a.m. buses to nowhere, rest stop bathrooms. A name. An address snagged from a real-estate site and memorized.

“I didn’t care what happened. I was going to find you.”

***

“Last night,” says Kate, and stops. It’s exactly what Isabel’s trying to make them forget, isn’t it? Smooth over with eggs and tortillas. Fried tortillas fix everything.

(I wish you could be happy.)

The scouring pad rasps over the bottom of the pan. “What about it?”

He won’t shut her down, but he won’t fill in any gaps for her, either. Typical. Jaw tightening, Kate roots for the pack of Tide pods under the sink. “I remembered that I never told you,” she bites off, and stops again. Some things you can’t say through your teeth. Upstairs the water keeps running and Gordo, probably stationed outside the bathroom door, begins to yowl. Kate rocks back on her heels. “You’re so good with her. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

She’s told herself this would reopen wounds forever scraped raw. She’s told herself he already knows.

He says, “She knew out of all of them I’d be the one to kill her.” Face wiped smooth, free from even a trace of outward guilt. _This is who I am, what I do._ A hitman scrubbing dishes in their kitchen, steady and calm. But Kate’s spent too many months watching him, and too many years hating him, to miss other signs. Fists clenching against tremors, eyes turned away. Words—an answer all too controlled.

She unbends, knees and ankles aching, suddenly dying for a cigarette. “She forgave you.”

“She forgives like you forgive.” No resentment tinges Alejandro’s voice. “She doesn’t forget.”

(Hurt her and I’ll kill you.)

This can’t last forever.

(Kate is sweat-tacky, sleep-slow again. On the edge of Isabel’s bed, studying the slope of his shoulders in the lamplight, the dip of Isabel’s head turning towards his. The dull, dark snivel: _See? He’s a ghost possessing you both.)_

Nothing lasts forever.

“Every night I see it in her eyes when she reaches out to me.” He returns the pan to the sink, rinses it clean. “Every night she reaches out to me. What else do you expect of me, Kate? It’s all I can do.”

She means to, as much as she doesn’t—it’s old ground, covered before, stomped into a muck, but some ugliness never comes clean. Kate says, “I know. You didn’t used to make exceptions for kids.”

Alejandro flicks the faucet off. His back to her, sunlight casting a watery halo around him—and she imagines the scars on his cheeks, hollowed out by early light. She sees herself, twisted and bitter and hateful in a way that, somehow, he has never become. Because Alejandro hasn’t once asked for redemption. Before or after Juárez, before or after Isabel. He carries each hurt, each death, without expecting to lay them down.

Kate reaches for her hair, bundling it back from her face. “Shit,” she says aloud, only half-hearing herself. The dishwasher pulses and hums. _Shit._ “I can’t apologize for that. I’m sorry.” Her eyes slide down, studying his bare feet beneath the cuffs of his sweatpants. Unable to look up, like a guilty little girl, unable to look him in the face when he finally turns to her.

“You said that I believed you thought too much of me,” Alejandro says. “Remember that?”

“They were little boys, they had no idea. One of them could’ve been Isabel’s age—you think about that. I know it.” Kate sighs. Her fingers curl, her entire body pulls taut. Ramrod-straight, unsteady at the core. “I don’t regret it,” she bursts out. It’s only then that she can jerk her head up. “Letting you back in, Isabel… I never did.”

Makes fuck-all sense, but what does anymore; she’s tired of her bitterness, of their rage. Tired of running in the same goddamn circles, tired of straddling the line, of living in this murky borderland when it’s all she has left, and being the monster is the only way Kate can be sure she’s still human. That she hasn’t forgotten. “Just don’t tell me they deserved it,” she says. “Any more than Isabel did, any more than your daughter did—shit. I’m sorry, Alejandro. I can’t. I can’t.”

He’s looking at her. He’s looking at her and for one moment his face opens, and Kate’s throat razors too sharp to speak. She reaches, fumbles for his hand, but Alejandro gently disentangles from her grip. She shakes her head. Hardly above a whisper— “We’re past this. Please.”

Long past; why can’t they be happy? For a minute, an hour? Why can’t they at least forget themselves?

She’s close enough to hear his breathing, the even, steady pulse of it. “The question,” he says, “had nothing to do with whether they deserved it or not.”

“No.” It didn’t.

Eyeing her sidelong, the way he did three years ago when Ted’s fingers were a fresh ring of bruises around her throat, he sighs. “There’s so much beauty in you, when you let yourself be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” Kate whispers.

“You’re always afraid.” It doesn’t sound like a compliment. But then, few things out of Alejandro’s mouth ever quite do.

She reaches for his hand. She takes it. “I won’t ask again,” she says, not a threat but a promise. What she’s asking—there’s no coming back from it.

 

**Chandler, AZ**

 

It happens. That first night, the first time they’ve seen each other in three years and the first time they’ve slept under the same roof, it happens once and they never bring it up again.

Kate kisses him, her lips dry, pulled thin. She smells and tastes like an ashtray, he smells and tastes like blood. There’s so much she should say, so much she won’t say. _I knew you’d come back. I’m glad you did. I hated you. I missed you._ Instead, she opens her mouth to his, and Alejandro, his thumb brushing the soft crook of her elbow, considers before pulling away.

“You don’t want this,” he says. He plants his own kiss to the corner of her mouth like a consolation prize, and Kate’s temper flares.

“Don’t you ever get tired of telling people what they want?”

Next morning, the jab of the couch springs still sharp in her bones, she gulps down a plan B pill two days past the expiration date, steps into the shower, and blasts the water almost too hot to stand.

(It was not the same thing.)

(No. It wasn’t.)

They never bring it up again.

 

**Bethesda, MD**

 

The guest bedroom: it’s slotted into an addition that juts out beside the back porch, bare and private. No pictures or paint on the walls, a set of cream sheets and a white duvet covering the bed. The door’s locked, the blinds slitted closed. For now they’re alone.  

“Don’t,” Kate says. The word stumbles out too soft, a mumble—she clears her throat and says, louder, “Don’t.”

Sitting on the edge of the bed, the wedding band worked halfway off his finger, Alejandro looks up. “You can’t replace her.” An assurance, compassion under blunt truth. _You’re enough. This is enough._

Her skin wearing thin, tiny shudders already welling south of her belly, biding their time. “Don’t take it off,” she says. “Please.”

They watch her, those eyes that remind Kate of a hound-dog’s or a much older man’s. Baggy, shadowed, forever unsurprised. Like the world quit being anything but a waiting room for him years ago; the people he meets now are tools, diversions at best. Nothing more.

She doesn’t believe that when she sees him with Isabel. And she’s fooling herself, probably, but she doesn’t believe that now.

She watches him. Alejandro nods, twists his ring back into place.

 

**2019**

 

“Call me,” Isabel mouths, waving from Dunkin’ Donuts’ back entrance, her purse clamped under her arm. _Call me when he calls._

Back home Kate sweeps the spilled cat food off the porch. She fills Gordo’s dish again and rattles it under the tree. The only sound that filters down through the branches is a hiss: he’s not budging any time soon.

“Fucking cat.”

Inside she fishes the burner cell, preprogrammed with just one number, out of her purse. Weighs it in her hand.

“Alejandro? It’s Kate.” Pacing from room to room, letting voicemail pick up her words. “Nothing’s wrong, don’t worry. We just…”

We miss you? We’re worried about you? Neither of those, though, is reason enough to call. She knows that.

“Never mind. Ignore this.” Too sharp. She stops, the phone still pressed to her ear, warming against her skin. Kate sighs. “Come home when you can.”

She slides the phone into her pocket and looks up, finds herself in the guest bedroom, its walls painted light green. Springbud. They used to be white. Minimalist until about a month ago, when Isabel somehow coaxed Alejandro into buying paint and primer; they had the first coat down by the time Kate made it home from work.

“It’s the ugliest room in the house,” was Isabel’s explanation—Kate thinks she was looking to practice her painting skills before redecorating her own bedroom. Isabel’s nothing if not practical. “We’re doing you a favor.”

“She’ll think you’re a soft touch,” Kate had warned. Springbud-green flecked both their arms, Isabel’s cheek and the graying hairs of Alejandro’s beard.

If he doesn’t—

“Maybe I am a soft touch,” he’d said, a roller still in his hand. Isabel’s eyes sparkled, and Kate laughed, so sudden and joyful she surprised herself.

She sags to the bed, to the buttercup bedspread from Pottery Barn that Carmen insisted went perfectly with the green. Kate closes her eyes. Bites, hard, into the inside of her cheek.

_Come when you can._

_Soon._

 

**2018**

 

Her knees bent, her thighs caged around his hips, clenching, unclenching. Kate shudders, mouth half-open, a moan building behind her teeth, low in her throat.

“You.” All she can say in between panting wet gasps, noises as soft and desperate as sobs. _“You.”_ Her hands on his shoulders, his sides, palming the raised, pebbled texture of his scar.

Alejandro moves over her, inside her. One hand cradled to the base of her skull, fingers tangled in, tugging at, the roots of her hair, he looks as dazed as Kate imagines she does. Half-asleep almost; face flushed and heavy-lidded.

 _Young._ It settles inside her, a leaden warmth. For now and only for now, Alejandro looks young.

Kate finds her voice. “Come here,” she manages, hands reaching to cup his head, pull it down to hers. She kisses his temple, the corner of his mouth, the shadows under his eyes and the gray threaded through his clipped-short beard. She presses her lips to the soft underside of his chin, his throat, and Alejandro groans, low and long, and rests his head against her shoulder.

 

**Chandler, AZ**

**2015**

 

Those moments—blown off her feet in the warehouse, backed to the wall in her apartment: Kate was his even then. He’s never, even for a minute, been hers.

 _I won’t see him again,_ she thinks, the gun lowered, her hands trembling. Tears in her eyes, she watches him walk away, the flap of his dark blue jacket in the breeze.

(Well, you should’ve shot him.)

He would have let her. Wouldn’t have begrudged Kate the killing shot after practically offering it up to her on a platter, and instead she stands stock-still, broken and furious, holding back sobs.  

Alejandro leaves.

She won’t see him again.

 

**Bethesda, MD**

**2018**

 

They’re neither of them good at asking for what they want. Not from each other.

“I’ll finish.” Kate moves to flip onto her side, breathing hard, fingers flickering down. “It’s okay.”

Alejandro’s hand rests heavy on her hip. “Lie back down.”

He shifts lower between her legs, still panting and loose-limbed, but his eyes are sharpening; Kate shakes her head, blood prickling in her cheeks. “God, don’t bother, I haven’t shaved in mon—”

His hand leaves her hip and presses, light and flat, to her belly. Anchors her. “Lie back down.”

***

She forgets herself. Not for long.

It’s enough.

***

It’s enough.

***

“Be careful with him.”

This is how it happens: Kate’s in the kitchen, her t-shirt tugged on too fast, her hair a mess, probably still smelling like sweat and sex. Sifting through the junk drawer for a new pack, she looks up. Isabel is there in a swimsuit, hair already damp from the shower and swooped away from a face as calm as the surface of the pool out back. “Did you hear me?” she asks, and repeats herself.

 _Be careful with him._ Kate thinks that the kid’s never really believed her, never accepted that Alejandro isn’t a good man and that he’d rather she didn’t think of him as one. She thinks that this is the reason—one of many—why she loves her.

She says, “I’ll try.”

***

This is how it happens.

“You aren’t her,” Alejandro says. He kisses Kate, his lips salty and sharp, opening her mouth as he opened the rest of her—with a tenderness she’s sensed inside him from the beginning, a tenderness that, now she feels the full force of it, almost breaks her in half. “You aren’t her,” he repeats afterwards, “but—” he cups her left breast “—you’re like her. In Juárez, El Paso… I saw it in you.”

Throat closed-off, she fits her thumb to the dent, the scarred-over hollow of his cheek. Alejandro’s eyes close. He sighs, short and heavy. Opens them.

“You have a good heart.”

“Shit.” Kate exhales, her smile wobbly. “Don’t put that on me. You know better.”

He knows her.

Alejandro circles her nipple with his thumb and index finger, rolling gently until it peaks. Kate bucks against him, just as gently. Works a leg free, hooks it over his. “I’m not your wife,” she says, mouth to his ear. “Isabel isn’t your daughter. It’s okay, Alejandro. It’s okay.”

This is what happens—for a minute he is hers. For a minute he gives himself over to her.

***

These are the things she tells herself, maybe the things he tells himself. The things they tell each other, never out loud.

That what they have now is different; they’re different, or they’re trying to be. The first time, rough and demanding on Kate’s couch, tongues prodding and teeth snagging until they both tasted blood, both desperate for what the other wouldn’t give up, the seething, razor-thin months afterwards—they can do better. Than that, at least.

That Isabel is really the one who matters, but not the only one who holds them together.

That there’s only so much he can deny them, Isabel and Kate both. That they know this—they tread it lightly when they can. They’re his family. They aren’t. The history strung between the three of them, with all its betrayals and bright spots, doesn’t equal the history he still has with his wife and his little girl—it doesn’t have to, but guilt eats at him, and guilt cuts both ways: _What else do you expect of me? It’s all I can do._

He knows that she won’t work for the FBI again, won’t take up contract work for the CIA no matter how much Matt needles her. She’s done for good, has been for years now. Kate used to think it was thanks to him that she lost the stomach for it. Blood and bullet holes and corpses rotting in walls. Men with guns making themselves at home in her kitchen. Except she’s never had a strong stomach, just bone-deep stubbornness to see her through. And stubbornness drains away, sooner or later, when you’ve got nothing to show for it. Either it was always bound to happen or it wasn’t. These days she works security, overqualified and underpaid, and when he’s around Alejandro fixes her morning cup of coffee (hopped up with enough sugar and hazelnut creamer to almost cover the taste) and doesn’t say a word. And she lets that be enough.

She knows he won’t stop—asking might help her peace of mind, not his. Alejandro is a man haunted, constantly on the move. Over the border and back again, from one life to another. Blood-spatter, the machine-gun pepper of bullets and the sprawl of broken bodies swapped out for summer evenings by the pool, helping Sadie into her water wings and staring Isabel down when she sneaks a sip of his beer. His finger on the trigger, his fingers tugging through Kate’s hair, an anchor sharp and gentle at once. And what it all says is—what he says without knowing—

That he isn’t a good man.

That he has a good heart.

***

“They were coming after me,” Isabel says, too calm, her eyes glassy and her breaths forced out even. “And I couldn’t hear them, I couldn’t hear anything—It was like how everything fades out, how your ears go right after an explosion, right? And I’m hiding, it’s dark, I’m hiding and I think they’re gone but I can’t hear anything, I can’t hear anything—” Gordo twines in her lap and she pulls him even closer, strokes his cotton-ball puff of a belly. “She was deaf,” she blurts. “His baby. Did he ever tell you that?”

Wordless, Kate shakes her head.

“My father knew. He knew.” Isabel bites her lip, her thumbnail. She chews words and spits them out. “So Alejandro took me away from him.”

It’s her complete lack of bitterness that always floors Kate. The certainty that it was all meant to happen; what’s done is done and all that really matters now is the reason behind it. Not forgiveness, exactly. Understanding, burning so bright it scorches.

 

**2019**

 

Feet slapping down the walkway, rushing. Purse flapping off one arm, tired eyes gaped wide, Isabel barrels up the steps, to the door they know waits unlocked. She cranks the knob and disappears inside, bursts of Spanish already firing out of her like bullets, the sticky-sweet smell of vanilla syrup-sludge washing back to Kate on a puff of air conditioning. Choking her.

The door swings wide open, waiting, welcoming. _Not yet,_ something hisses through her gut. _Not yet._ So she freezes, feet shuffling on the creaking boards, the takeout box of stale donuts clamped under one arm, the car keys dangling from the other.

His battered car pulled into the driveway. Every time, it surprises her. Home safe; every time it feels like a gift, or a fluke. And part of Kate bristles, half-furious, half-sick, sunburn-sharp and chlorine-raspy; cigarette smoke, the memory of tears, a barb in her throat. Every time.

She shifts the takeout box, coughs. Behind her a solid weight thumps down to the porch—Gordo whisks between Kate’s legs and through the doorway, yowling for someone (Isabel) to pick him up.

Fucking cat.

***

“Tía?” It always sounds soft, lamplight-warm and pink-tinged. It’s Isabel’s version of “sweetheart” or “honey,” a pat on the back or a squeeze to the shoulder, and Kate’s heard it, she estimates, all of two times. She and Isabel, they aren’t soft. Never have been. Still, when they’re all crowded around the kitchen table, edging up on twelve o’clock, feet heavy and eyes heavier, she can begin to see that it’s working. That they’re learning how to take care of each other.

“Jelly or cream?” Isabel points to the box.

She shakes her head. “I’m good.”

Alejandro sits between them, powdered sugar coating his fingers, eyes emptied out. They always are, after.

(“For you.” A kiss pressed to the crown of Isabel’s head. “For you.” A kiss pressed to Kate’s cheek. He smells like exhaustion, airplane bathrooms. Happiness blotted out by the closest he ever gets to surprise—he expects to come home to an empty house, expects to find them gone. Every time. Kate knows this.)

“How was the test?” he asks now, reaching for a napkin.

“Algebra?” Isabel hedges. She darts a glance Kate’s way; Kate raises an eyebrow. _Tell the truth._  

Alejandro wipes his fingers clean, waits.

“A C,” she says, quick and flat, like she doesn’t much care. Another glance Kate’s way, and this time she cracks, offering Isabel a quick smile. _See? It’s okay._

Alejandro doesn’t. “A C.” He shifts in his chair, the wooden slats creaking as he angles away from Kate, completely toward Isabel. “You can do better,” he says, his eyes boring into hers—Kate can tell from the way Isabel stares back, jaw tightening, ready for the fight—and then he shakes his head, sits back. “Tomorrow, sí? Come here.”

The little boys, Kate can’t help imagining them when she watches Isabel wrap her arms around Alejandro’s neck, hide her face in the curve where it meets his shoulder like a little girl. A little girl, little boys, bones in acid, bullets through the head. Snuffed out. And sudden, selfish and brutal, she pushes them away. They’re always here beside them. She can keep it all from showing in her voice, her face. For now.

Isabel’s gaze flicks up. Sensing it, probably, she flickers something at Kate, a not-quite grin too sharp and too soft at the same time. “You want to sit in his lap?” she asks. “I can move.”

The laugh jerks up through Kate’s throat, gangling and a little painful—Alejandro turns back to her, Isabel’s arms still around his neck, a small smile playing across the ragged-tired folds of his face when he reaches out. Their hands lace close, palm to palm. Kate squeezes, thinking of all the ways they’re tangled together, the mess of them, thinking that this can’t last, unless, somehow, it does, thinking that she’s about to drift off, right here in this chair, thinking that, tonight, she’ll fall asleep beside him.

***

Later they’ll talk about what left his hands checkerboarded with scratches, knuckles tattered, someone’s last grasp at life marked across the skin. The way they do, bluntness mixed with switchbacks, half-truths. Kate might hate herself for it, might hate him. Or maybe not. Lately, each time has been a gamble.

“I must have called when you were in the air,” she mumbles, face half-buried in the pillow, lids already fused shut. “Sorry.”

The creaking heave as he turns over, the gust of his breath on her cheek. Never how she pictured the end of the story, not once.

“It was good to hear your voice,” he says.

 

**2018**

 

“—thought it would look real nice in the family room, I hope you don’t mind…”

Carmen stands in front of her, forehead pleated, nervous fuschia-pink nails tracing patterns across the top of the side table, and Kate, surrounded, all of them scattered through different rooms but Isabel’s presence, Alejandro’s, snagged through the back of her mind like fish hooks, just thinks that it’s lucky Carmen seems to know where all this stuff goes, she has no goddamn idea.

She doesn’t see it now, the way all of this will settle. New sags in the couch, a jumble of shoes by the front door, damp beach towels fluttering over the porch railings. The fridge door shaggy with shopping lists, school and work schedules, post-its with Carmen’s cell number and therapist appointments scribbled down. Isabel’s school photo, curled strands of hair framing her jaw, uncertain eyes. Their voices will hang in the air, the empty rooms and blank corners grow to fit them.

Kate can’t see it, can’t see what’s coming at all, but she nods, and she smiles. “It’s perfect,” she says, with real warmth, and could be that’s enough to cover everything else. “Thank you.”

 

 _We mourn the broken things, chair legs_  
_wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,_  
_the threadbare clothes. We work the magic_  
_of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes._  
_We save what we can, melt small pieces_  
_of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones_  
_for soup. Beating rugs against the house,_  
_we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading_  
_across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw_  
_the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs_  
_out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie._  
_I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,_  
_listen for passing cars. All day we watch_  
_for the mail, some news from a distant place._

                                  — Natasha Trethewey, “Housekeeping”

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this fic for months now and couldn't have gotten it finished, let alone polished and posted, without all the help and encouragement from [duchamp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/duchamp/pseuds/duchamp)/[caelestes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/caelestes/pseuds/caelestes), aka [hapans](https://hapans.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr, aka the best beta a girl could ask for. She's the reason there aren't a whole ton of embarrassing mistakes in this story, and was my #1 cheerleader through the whole ordeal of drafting. So go check out her fics—they're amazing! Also, I did my best with the Spanish, but since it's mostly Google Translate, something hokey is bound to have crept in. Sorry in advance, and let me know if you spot any mistakes.


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